Drew Gilpin Faust

For more than 40 years, Sally Mann has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature's magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work-portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and other studies-is that it is all "bred of a place," the American South. Mann, who is a native of Lexington, Virginia, has...